Later today here in a cold and slushy Washington, Gordon Brown will become the first European leader to meet President Barack Obama at the White House. While Nicolas Sarkozy cries great heaving sobs of envy, Brown is expected to try to convince Obama of the need for a "global New Deal that will lay the foundations not just for a sustainable economic recovery but for a genuinely new era of international partnership," prior to next month's G20 summit in London, which will be Obama's first European trip since the election campaign. (Ah, memories...) But the other motive behind Brown's visit is clearly to try to remedy the PM's domestic political woes by getting close enough to the president to steal away with a bit of his Magic Aura of Hope. There's much confusion right now about exactly what kind of public appearance the two men may make, and when -- Obama, after all, has a rather important meeting with the Boy Scouts of America to deal with today, not to mention visits to the departments of transportation and the interior -- but rest assured: when it happens, we'll be liveblogging it. Come back here today and tomorrow for ongoing blog coverage of Brown's trip, including the moment tomorrow when he becomes only the fifth prime minister in British history (after Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher and Blair) to address both houses of Congress.

UPDATE: We now know that Brown is expected at the White House at 11.30am eastern, 4.30pm UK time, for a 45-minute meeting, into which brief period he's apparently expected to cram everything he wants to discuss about the banking system, Afghanistan, Iran and climate change. Either before or after that meeting, the two men will appear briefly in front of reporters in the Oval Office, a planned Rose Garden press conference having been scaled down and moved indoors "because of the snow". Since the appearance will be so much shorter than previously implied, and since it's not actually snowing -- there's some snow on the ground, but none's forecast to fall from the sky today -- it's hard to avoid interpreting this as something of a snub.